Dude, What's with the Web Site?

I've been in the web business for 20 years.

The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely one of the first 200 sites to go live on the web. Search engines then returned ten results because that's all there were. Yeah. We've been around that long. We just might have been the first site with a background color other than gray.

During that time, I've learned a few things. One of them is that probably half our competition went out of business trying to build a "cool" web site. The reason is really pretty simple. HTML is designed to present text and the occasional image. When you spend money and time to try to make it do more than that: it fails.

CSS is awful. The only reason most people don't complain more about it is because that's all they have. HTML is awful too, but at least it does something on its own. Javascript is marginally useful, but also pretty bad. You can spend days, weeks and months cramming them together in new and innovative ways and ultimately you'll end up with a lot of wasted time and a site made of text and the occasional image.

You know those sites with the long lists of really amazing-looking web designs? Funny how all those links go to empty sites with a link trying to sell you the domain, isn't it?

DOS was the same way. It was a simple, quick shell and file system for PCs. It took a couple of stone cold geniuses years to make it play DOOM. Why? DOS wasn't designed for that. It's a shell with a file system. All the DOOM parts had to be invented from scratch.

I have decided after 20 years that I'm tired of trying to make the web site equivalent of DOOM. HTML is text and the occasional image. Text and the occasional image. That's it.

Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C.

Now we do get some benefits for doing our web site this way. One, it's simple and easy to update. Two, it's not cluttered with distractions. Three, it loads ultra fast and works on all browsers. Why look at that! We've solved all the problems most "amazing" web sites have, at zero cost!

Think about all the most popular, successful web sites. Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. They are all simple and functional, and those six web sites together represent about a trillion dollars in value.

Simple and functional. That's what our site is going to be. We have a lot of information to present to clients, readers, gamers, etc. We have a choice. We can spend six months building a gee-whiz site, or we can build more cool products. I chose the products.

We use Flash too. You know why we use Flash? Because the authoring tools are mature, they work, they interoperate well with other important studio tools like Photoshop, Indesign and After Effects, and they allow us to make our graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good.

Someday we might use HTML5 too. But Flash had a 16-year head start, so we're going to use what works today. If you are on an Apple phone or you just don't want to run Flash, there are ways to turn it off. If you see big blank places in our site, that's probably the reason. If you want to look at our Flash stuff, it's there.

We also no longer care about SEO, so you won't see web pages with titles like "Amazing games for gamers in game sites with games for gaming gamers." Not sure if that matters to you much, but at least you'll be able to read the title if you bookmark us.

We load almost no content from outside our network other than YouTube, we rarely use cookies, and there's almost no middleware, Javascript, databases or any other slow, buggy nonsense here, so you won't have to stare at progress bars all afternoon. We don't use tags, feeds, categories, sub-categories, widgets, plug-ins, in-plugs, geolocation, the "cloud," the "mist," fog or haze either. Less is more. More or less.

We also don't really care much if you like us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, Bibbo Babbo, Flimsy, Ratfeet and the Giant Shovel, YouTube, StumbleBumble, Giggle, or I've Got an Ant Problem. If you like what you see, want to keep up with our books or audiocasts, or just want a break from the rest of the web's attempts to cram just one more ad into your browser window, use that ancient technology called a bookmark. It works on phones too!